Lab assignments and discussion for the JOUR 230 students at Lehigh University.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Emilie's Class Reflection

This
was definitely the most valuable class I’ve taken at Lehigh so far in terms of
my future career goals in the digital magazine industry. The amount of work in
this class was not underestimated and I truly believe that it was a survival
class, but I learned some really valuable things that I hope to apply this
summer as a web intern at New York Magazine. Prior to this course, I was just
getting comfortable with regularly tweeting and “being involved in the
conversation” on social media. I quickly learned from my web internship at
Cosmopolitan.com last fall that using twitter is crucial and employers for that
presence in the web industry. I like practicing live tweeting, blogging, and
slowly creating my own website with all of my blog posts. One of my goals for
myself going into the semester was to actually start my own blog and to
practice pitching and writing news articles using the same techniques that we
had used as interns for a website. I’m really glad that I had the opportunity
to do the curation assignment in this class and wrote posts every week. Through
this assignment I also got a better feel for my voice as a writer. When you
write articles on the web, everything has to be succinct and catch the
audience’s attention. I noticed that last fall I didn’t have much practice with
blogging and I believe this has helped me sharpen my editorial skills that are
used in the web industry.

Another
really valuable skill that I picked up in this class was interviewing people
whether they were scheduled or impromptu interviews like the ones we did for
the scavenger hunt. It’s great to get comfortable grabbing random strangers and
getting them to want to talk to you about a subject. This can be difficult
obviously because everyone is going about their own schedules, but it’s also
necessary to be able to get that time from them and to be approachable.

I
also really enjoyed becoming familiar with FinalCut this semester, I think that
storytelling through videos is an important skill, and because I’m tedious in
nature, I enjoyed putting the story timelines together and creating the
documentary and shorter videos. Although, I think my strength is more editorial
than it is video production. Also I was really amazed by how big Periscope has
become, and I’m glad we had the opportunity to use it before it blew up on
social media and before every company fell into the Periscope hole.

Although
I touched a little bit on my curation assignment already, I really enjoyed all
three aspects of it. At first tweeting out links twice a day seemed like a daunting
task for someone who was just getting used to tweeting once every other day,
however, by the end of the semester it came natural and I was constantly on the
look out for cool fitness articles on twitter without even really noticing that
I was doing it. I also thought that becoming involved in fitness.com’s Facebook
world was interesting because I used to steer clear from commenting on pages in
the past. It’s funny because I always noticed that the Facebook reactions were
much more harsh than the twitter ones and people would go off on rants on some
of the fitness.com posts. I remember this was the case with Cosmopolitan’s Facebook
page as well and people on the web are always quick to notice flaws or glitches
with the articles.